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Lean manufacturing boosts productivity

Improvements require effort from all workers

Optima Manufacturing VP Manufacturing Dwayne Barnett-Ritcey poses in the manufacturing area on March 6, 2014.

Photograph by: Colleen De Neve
, Calgary Herald

Productivity usually makes all the difference to a company's bottom line and nowhere is that more apparent than in the manufacturing sector. Its implications for workers from the top down were one topic at a recent information session hosted by Calgary Economic Development.

Dwayne Bartnett-Ritcey is living the concepts of lean manufacturing every day as vice-president of Calgary-based Optima Manufacturing Ltd.

"Implementing lean can really help because it pushes lean down to everyone involved," he said. "It's not just the manufacturers."

As a high-mix, low-volume manufacturer competing in a global market, lean concepts have implications for everyone from the management team to workers on the shop floor.

"It allows interested people to really show their skills. You need them educated enough in the lean systems to know when we're doing something wrong," said Barnett-Ritcey.

It requires upper-level support while sustaining those lean programs, which comes with communicating, he adds.

Chris Ortiz, president of Bellingham, Wash.-based Kaizen Assembly, spends his time doing lean training sessions and implementation. He said it gets down to simple processes that improve manufacturing processes and decrease waste production. "Lean is all about changing culture," Ortiz said. "People get really caught up in running a business a certain way and they forget to step back and look at their processes of how they're doing their work."

It's now one of the most highly sought-after skill sets in manufacturing, he added.

Lean manufacturing roots actually date back to Japan after the Second World War when the country wasn't allowed to make products that directly competed with American products, so they focused their efforts on the automotive industry using the first lean concepts to make their plants as efficient as possible.

American automakers then began to widely adopt lean principles and it spread to other sectors in the 1980s, but the concept has been growing particularly steadily in the last 10 years. It has strong implications for the manufacturing workforce in terms of upgrading or adding new skills to be more effective in a lean environment, says Ortiz.

Barnett-Ritcey, for example, took a "Blackbelt" certification for "Lean Six Sigma" through Productivity Alberta and is encouraging others to seek the training in his organization.

If people in manufacturing don't understand concepts such as "5S," the visual workplace, cell manufacturing, standard work and single piece flow, Kanban material replenishment or lean office implementations for sales and order processing, they could quickly become irrelevant.

"Lean is legislated common sense," Barnett-Ritcey says. "It's almost like a how-to of doing stuffyou should already be doing anyway and likely know you should be doing."

Lean concepts not only improve performance in a process, but it gets people to change their culture in terms of how they think and run a business.

Canada's overall productivity has traditionally lagged many other industrialized countries. In a global economy that pits the country's manufacturers against those in emerging economies, such as China, it can become a key driver to profitability.

In a role with a previous company, Ortiz would only consider hiring workers with "lean experience."

"At least an understanding of the (lean) concepts will put you above other organizations," he says.

He's still surprised by the number of companies that have yet to adopt the principles. "I still come across these really big organizations that definitely have the financial means and support to incorporate lean and they're not doing it," Ortiz says.

It's about ways to find different types of inefficiencies in the production process, which result in long lead times. They include things like unneeded transportation, inventory controls, plant floor layout, properly trained operators, imbalanced work between departments and other factors.

"It's organizing and finding ways in your processes - any processes - to process a job order and do it faster," Barnett-Ritcey says.

"There are a lot of interesting tools. It can dig down if you're willing to use it."

While high-volume operations can more readily adopt lean concepts, there are a lot of tools that other organizations can use.

"There are so many tools we can adapt," he adds.

"If you know what you're doing, you use it, you adapt it (and) understand what the tool's basic premise is."

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